The so called
"browser
wars"
between
Microsoft's
Internet Explorer
and
Netscape's
Navigator created a ripe medium for each company to invent "features" that were outside of the W3C's guidelines for HTML
code. This in turn lead to some visitors being unable to view the results of these features. In order
to try to give every visitor the same experience, coders had to design contorted code for each browser's capabilities.
The emergence of Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera has improved the issue of standards as user choice
marginalizes inhouse "features" such as the detested "blink" command.
The newly designed HTML5 set of standards are likely to bring all the latest iterations of web browsers into line,
making the coder's job more simple. It is still possible to create poorly coded web-sites
so browsers accommodate to make the visitor's experience the best possible.
Bad code means bad results in the search engine listings. Using standard, error free code
is considered a distinct "plus" with search sites.